Loved ones long-gone come alive
again with the discovery of long-forgotten portraits.
John L. Williams and Mary Emma Fowler Williams are
together again, side by side, husband and wife, for the first time in over a
century. Or, at least, they�re together again in portraiture.
They were separated by a tragic train accident that took
John�s life in 1909, leaving 33-year-old Mary alone, carrying their final
child, a girl like her five sisters, her name � Johnnie � both a tribute to,
and a remnant of, the father she would never know.
These portraits of John and Mary would lie wrapped in
tissue paper, unframed, for decades, and were offered to me by Mary and
John�s granddaughter, my mother, who, like me, is puzzled why no one ever
framed, much less hung, these silent sentinels of a lost time.
Now properly framed and matted, affixed firmly in our
upstairs hallway, these 8 x 10 hand-tinted portraits, taken only shortly
before John�s death, freeze in time a young couple with a large and growing
brood of girls, living in a dusty crossroads town in west-central Georgia,
each offering the photographer a properly serious face and a proper display
of Sunday attire.
On the left is John, his handlebar mustache stretching
jaw to jaw, wearing a dark coat, pressed white shirt and bow tie. On the
right there�s Mary, her long hair pulled back tightly, wearing a white
blouse demurely covering even her neck, the hint of ruffles on the front the
only concession to fashion or frivolity.
Mary�s serious look must surely have turned profoundly
sad when word of the accident reached her, leaving her to raise six young
girls alone, in a world where workplace options for women, especially in
rural areas, were limited or nonexistent. So helped by her brother Bart, she
did what she had to, opening her home as a boarding house, renting rooms to
passing �drummers,� as traveling salesmen were called in that time, and
taking in sewing and other handcraft work to piece together a meager income
for her and her girls.
Sadly, two of them never reached adulthood, one dying of
disease, the other in an accident, Mary�s heart broken two times more. But
during a time when self-pity must surely have been a luxury few could
afford, Mary persevered, raising her girls, insisting they be able to make
their own way in a challenging world, building in each a passion for
learning, both through school textbooks and through the Good Book that Mary
encouraged them to hold near as their lifelong guide.
All four heeded her, each following one of the few career
paths then available to women, each becoming a schoolteacher during the
decade of the 1920s, when life was roaring in the big cities and the pages
of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but was merely puttering in small Georgia towns and
villages like Harris and Woodbury, where they grew up, and Thomaston, where
Mary and her four girls would settle.
Two would marry and raise families, the other two would
continue working. Far from shrinking into old age, though, Mary and her two
single daughters enlarged in the eyes of grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, splashing color onto the black-and-white world in which
they grew up with wonderful family stories of church tent revivals, outhouse
visits on cold nights, picnics on hot summer days,
trips by horse and buggy to call on family and friends.
Mary�s four daughters called her �Mama� throughout her
life, and Mama she would become to her grandchildren and
great-grandchildren, and through shared stories,
to her great-great-grandchildren as well.
Mama passed away on a cool, sunny Sunday morning in early
January 1966, the day after she turned 90, and a few days before I turned
10. During the holidays that year, my family was visiting the rambling house
on the edge of town where Mama lived with my grandparents, and her two
single daughters.
I vividly remember the hushed early-morning voices, the
light air of the holiday season turned heavy, the bed where she spent her
nights now empty, the rocker where she spent her days now casting long
shadows over the braid rug in the small �sitting room.�
Mary was born into a world little more than 10 years
removed from the Civil War, that awful crucible that forged the nation we
know today. The Mama she would become left little more than three years
before the first man walked on the moon.
In this long-forgotten portrait, I see a shy, modest
young wife and mother. But I also see the strong, secure older woman she
would become, in her last decade reaching down three generations to touch my
life. And by sharing her stories with my children, they�ve gotten to know a
great-great-grandmother they never met.
